sirguessalot

a little off topic, but maybe not... ive looked into this. further complicated is how there are about a dozen different ways "spiritual" is used in English. Some say it means "supernatural," some say it means "emotional," some say it means "existential", some say it means "causal," some say it means "whatever is your ultimate concern", so on and so forth. So I say it depends on how the word is being used in that moment. As long as we are at least interested in inquiring, the word can be useful. Otherwise, its as confusing as any other of those old words, like "God" "love" "heaven" "hell" etc... We may assume someone is using it the same way we do...but odds are against it. "enlightenment" too, a diverse set of definitions in play. In addition to being the result of exploration, experimentation and such as waysider pointed out, i would have to add "enlightenment" also comes with disillusionment and loss of previous views. And is oftentimes accidental, unexpected, and comes with a certain element of confusion. Some speak of "enlightenment" as being some sort of ultimate once-in-a-lifetime event. Others consider the onset of rational thought (in people or the world) as enlightenment. Others say life is an ongoing series of big and little enlightenments, involving different depths and degrees of enlightenments. I can also appreciate the old saying that "death is enlightenment at gunpoint." Some sages of old, when referring to "the ground of awareness" that enlightenment seekers seek, ask "who is not already enlightened?" So, perhaps not only does TWi contradict itself, scripture contradicts itself, God contradicts God, we contradict ourselves...even language contradicts itself....perfectly imperfect.

masturbation is a strategy...not a need

reminds me of another scriptural "contradiction" some places tell us to be be like children, or that we are eternal children, and other places tell us to grow up, stop acting like children, and become wise.

well said...after all, it is still such an awesome finger. also reminds me of one of the sayings about practicing presence..."practice does not work, but it does make us more accident prone." contradictions abound...like wisdom in folly yeah. not all children are the same stage.

its as if we have replaced a direct experience of the presence of an immediate God with mere concepts of a remote God. language, like scripture, is like a finger pointing at the moon...and we can't take our eyes of the finger.

absolute and relative the one and the many inner and outer whether or not it seems so, seems to depend on where one draws that line between self and other...in any given moment. parallel to the development of faith is the development of ego-awareness. "just who do you think you are?" As in life, seems scripture is full of such paradox.

and...if one includes the possibility that the different books of the Bible were not only written by people at different "stages of faith," but written about people and cultures and histories at different "stages of faith"...and all that has been, will be, and currently is being interpreted from different stages of faith...all the contradictions and paradoxes are still perfect. Life in God is both gardenlike and musical...and wild and noisy.

Ive heard this pattern described in the fields of transpersonal psych as being a result of a "pre-trans fallacy" often made by conventional worldviews, where they cannot tell the difference between pre- and post-conventional stages of interpretation, and simply lump them all into pre- for being non-conventional. So, when students leave their mythic-literal nest to have their mythological worldviews debunked by conventional institutions, those same institutions essentially put a cap on further development into post-conventional stages of faith...either by denying that they exist, or denying that they are accessible. Students generally either conform to a conventional worldview or seek post-conventional information elsewhere. This is particularly difficult for students who may be experiencing a spiritual crisis that requires a post-conventional approach.

Perhaps just as the robin cannot skip being an egg and get to hatchling, nor can it skip being a hatchling and learn how to fly, we cannot skip a period of "mythic-literal" faith (like twi) and still get to having a faith in reason. Nor can we skip such rational faith and still acquire faith in compassion...so on and so forth. (That ladder seems to goes a long ways...in both directions. And so wherever we find ourselves...seems we are always somewhere in the middle, simply for being human. Rejoice.) And, just as not all robins even live to see flight, not all humans live to see faith in reason, or live to see that unreasonably radical compassion, etc... So, while we cannot skip stages of faith, there also seems no guarantee that we grow beyond any given stage of faith. Though I pray we do...and we will, in general. Yet, like eggs, and hatchlings, and young birds, and parental birds, and dying birds…and perhaps even dead birds...all faiths are valid and necessary…and all are incomplete. This is why i say no, not "lies from hell"...more like a culture of arrested development...somewhere between "Intuitive-Projective" and "Mythic-Literal" based on Fowler's stages of faith. Maybe like being stuck somewhere between hatchling and flight.

yeah Ham. apt analogy. it seems stages of faith development are not minor adjustments in our worldviews (or Godviews), but radical leaps. like the nest...what was once a victory and bonus eventually becomes a liability and a tomb. and this ladder we are on has more than 2 rungs. get used to contradictions and paradox.

"lie from Hell" seems a bit of a stretch. One would first have to know a truth in order to lie about it. i vote for profound misunderstanding. Or a natural state of deluded ignorance. Forgivable...for they know not what they do.

thanks again, Steve. I think i get the gist of what you are saying, that 1) Wierwille was wrong as usual, 2) in this case, he was wrong because Acts was not written to the Church, but to the Roman legal system using Greco-Roman cosmology....to which i cannot disagree. but, like you said: so my questions about how we understand the cosmology of the apostles regarding that Pentecost experience seem quite outside the scope you intended for this thread. fair enough. but i do recommend adding a developmental element to that hermeneutic circle, as well as a more comparitive inter-religious element. Because even ancients within a single group (such as the apostles) experienced/interpreted/communicated their own cosmologies/mythologies from profoundly different stages of life and growth, where meanings behind "spiritual" and "divine" can change dramatically many times in life. Psychological and cognitive development did not begin in recent history. yeah, cman...3rd person perspective. Fitting for the legal arena.

so, if the author/s of Acts were somehow writing to a non-Christian worldview regarding the Pentecost experience, how do we find out what they really believed happened on Pentecost? if not Wierwillian, or Greco-Roman, then what? what did the apostles and disciples believe about that sound from Heaven?

Thanks for the all the clarifications, Steve. I had never heard of Acts being written as a legal brief.

from a wikipedia article on Heaven (Judaism)... from the opening post: but even from a casual survey of occurances of "heaven" in the Bible, we see "the fowls of heaven," "the dew of heaven," and "the clouds of heaven," all of which seem to indicate that some scripture does indeed refer to a heaven that is most certainly this side of the moon. then there is that celestial/astronomical/astrological heaven, and there is plenty of scriptural references to it. and then there is a heaven that is even more heavenly than that? imho, this is the least understood, and probably the most important. it involves the "realm" of consciousness, or awareness. and something it shares with both of the other heavens, is that all 3 are also right here, right now, surrounding us, and within us. air, space and consciousness. but we are born like innocent fish who do not know how uttlerly soaking wet in heaven we are, and life is about waking up and noticing. and some ancients did exactly that. like Abraham and Moses.

i do too depends on which ancient culture...and when.

ha yeah. happened the other day too i recall.

i agree that wierwille's method involved gobs of forced explanations. But again, one of my main points is that it seems there was no consensus among "the ancients." So we basically cannot effectively speak of "ancients" as thinking this way or that way as a whole without some further contextualization. Not even if we narrow the context down to an ethnicity, or region, or period. Not even the Jews had a common cosmology in the early first century. Also, thinking outloud here...i think its important to point out that if the Psalms were indeed written as songs, and the lyrics vividly poetic, metaphorical...."down" could mean quite a few things. "Higher" and "lower" does not always mean mere physical altitude. It can refer to different vibrational frequencies, or higher and lower "orders of complexity" in the universe or consciousness or "kindgoms of God," or higher and lower "along the ladder of angelic realms..." yada yada yada. But even if the lyrics were meant to be literally physical or somehow spatial...and heaven was somewhere outside of the earth's atmosphere....and God was the author of Psalms with awareness of the shape and position of the earth in the solar system...seems it may read "The Lord looks in from heaven..." yep. if God is everywhere in time and space, how can God be looking somewhere that God is not, unless it is some sort of metaphor?

well, "cosmology" is a word that was introduced in the 1700s. "ancient" and "the ancients" are words that point at a very wide and diverse field of experience and history. and clearly, the Greeks were not the first or only human earthlings to study and contemplate and develop a theory for the structure of the universe. and that 500-year-old view was not the only view in the world at the time of the writing of the Book of Acts. and it is not even clear whether that cosmology was even the cosmology that the authors (and/or disciples) viewed the world through. so i am wondering if Steve is saying that author/s, the disciples, or even Jesus somehow exclusively viewed or interpreted or expressed the universe through the Aristotelian model or something...which then proves why Wierwille was wrong about where "heaven" is.

You lost me at "According to ancient cosmology," Steve. Seems more like you are referring to a very specific ancient cosmology and comparing it to Wierwille's. Are you trying to say that this cosmology you describe is not only more valid than Wierwille's, but the most valid cosmology? Or that it is the cosmology of the author/s of the Book of Acts? just trying to help clarify.

to add...many top graduates with "authentic" degrees from world-class institutions are doing exactly what they were taught...and the whole world is suffering for it. In economics, for example. And agriculture. Medicine. The list goes on. Struggling to cram conventional remedies down the throat of post-conventional scenarios. "all the kings horses and all the kings men..." Penny-wise...dollar stupid. ... edited to add... was born into a long line of working class military industrial wage slaves. "higher education" was not in my vocabulary or on my map before twi. so the promise and illusion of a diverse and practical education in twi and the way corps helped draw me in. in the years since twi i have sought to acquire the knowledge and skills i felt are most relevant and useful in 3rd-world America at the dawn of the 21st century. like twi's programs, conventional "higher education" failed to convince. so i dove into post-conventional forms of psychology, hospice, and gardening...so not just gardening, but regenerative forms of "agriculture"...the form that comes after the land has been desertified and poisoned. sometimes, one generation's epic "success" is another's epic failure.

yeah....regret, guilt, self-loathing, cynicism...even dealing with the anti-humanity attitude that comes with the onset of the spiritual desert/wilderness experience. but like st paul seemed to say..."dont stop the singing, and dont forget how and why." like how some psalms were written by someone who could not forgive God (or self, or others) ...to be sung by people who cannot not forgive God (or self, or others) ...or played for those who cannot forgive God (or self, or others) some rock n roll works well, too as with most all genres a lot of music is like that, but the psalms were written specifically to help identify and alleviate dis-ease of the soul. ...like a tuning fork to help us locate and extract the most hidden kinds of thorns.

Doctrinal/theological issues regarding death and dying aside, while we can look at overall forgiveness, seems to me it also helps to notice the different types of forgiveness we are challenged by. As i see them: - Being forgiven by God (like Geisha pointed out) - Being forgiven by someone else (an individual or group, living or dead). - Forgiving our self. - Forgiving a person, or group. - Forgiving God/reality/the universe. imho, all of them are valid and a part of our lives and the TWI experience, and each one has at least a Psalm. Here are some percentages from a hospice educator regarding the dominant forgiveness issues based on 500 patients at the end of their life: - with self 66% - with others 17% - with God 6% - multi-level 11% seems we posted at the same time, cman. and yeah, "dying" means a lot more than "dying."

Thanks for telling more of the story Geisha. Sounds like an ugly experience for both of you.

amen, Kit. to all points.